[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":246},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article:four-auspicious-directions:en":3,"article-topic:eight-mansions-feng-shui:en":140,"related-articles:en:eight-mansions-feng-shui:four-auspicious-directions:":235},{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":12,"noindex":13,"summary":14,"sections":15,"references":101,"relatedTools":123,"seo":124,"contentImage":126},"four-auspicious-directions","Four Auspicious Directions in Eight Mansions: The Verse and the Table","How the Da You Nian song turns one line of verse into eight directions: the reading order, a table for all eight gua, the rank order of the four favourable names, and what the table cannot decide.","Feng Shui","eight-mansions-feng-shui","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fsiji-xiangfang-jiangjie.html","zhang-hao","2026-01-31","2026-10-29",false,"The four favourable directions are generated rather than chosen. One verse, read around the eight palaces from your own trigram, produces the whole table — and the same table ranks the four, so you know which to drop first.",[16,21,27,73,79,85,91,98],{"heading":17,"body":18},"Four names, one line of verse, and no judgement calls",[19,20],"Eight Mansions does not ask which direction feels good. It hands you a fixed vocabulary of eight names and a rule that assigns them to the eight compass directions. Four land on the favourable side — Sheng Qi (生气), Tian Yi (天医), Yan Nian (延年), Fu Wei (伏位). Four land on the other — Jue Ming (绝命), Wu Gui (五鬼), Liu Sha (六煞), Huo Hai (祸害). The assignment is generated by a mnemonic called the Da You Nian song (大游年歌), eight lines of verse, one for each trigram.","That has two consequences worth holding on to. The first is that the four auspicious directions are not four separate gifts you can shop from. They are four positions in one ordered list, and the list is produced by the verse rather than chosen by anyone. The second is that nothing in the process looks at your health, your marriage, your job, or your year beyond the number that gives you the gua. It is arithmetic on a birth year and a compass bearing, and it is repeatable — which is the only reason it is worth writing down.",{"heading":22,"body":23},"Reading one verse into eight directions",[24,25,26],"The rule takes a sentence to state. Start at the trigram itself, which takes Fu Wei. Then walk the eight palaces in the fixed order of the Later Heaven arrangement — Kan north, Gen northeast, Zhen east, Xun southeast, Li south, Kun southwest, Dui west, Qian northwest — reading one character of the verse per palace as you go.","Take Qian. Its verse is 乾六天五祸绝延生. Walking from Qian the order is Kan, Gen, Zhen, Xun, Li, Kun, Dui, so Kan reads 六煞, Gen reads 天医, Zhen reads 五鬼, Xun reads 祸害, Li reads 绝命, Kun reads 延年, Dui reads 生气, and Qian itself is 伏位. A Qian person's four favourable directions are therefore Dui in the west (生气), Gen in the northeast (天医), Kun in the southwest (延年) and Qian in the northwest (伏位).","One property is worth checking, because it is the fastest way to catch a mistake. 生气 always lands on a trigram from the same group as the one you started from: east group with east group, west group with west group. Qian is west group, and Dui is too. Run the verse and get an east-group trigram as 生气 for a west-group gua, and the verse has been read from the wrong starting point or in the wrong direction around the ring.",{"heading":28,"body":29,"table":32},"The eight verses",[30,31],"Eight lines cover every case. There is no row for 5 because 5 has no trigram of its own: a result of 5 becomes Kun 2 for men and Gen 8 for women, so those two rows cover it.","Read a row across and you have that person's four favourable directions. Read the verse itself and you can reproduce the row: for Xun the verse is 巽天五六祸生绝延, so Li takes 天医 (south), Kun takes 五鬼, Dui takes 六煞, Qian takes 祸害, Kan takes 生气 (north), Gen takes 绝命, Zhen takes 延年 (east), and Xun keeps 伏位.",{"headers":33,"rows":40},[34,35,36,37,38,39],"Gua","Verse (大游年歌)","Sheng Qi 生气","Tian Yi 天医","Yan Nian 延年","Fu Wei 伏位",[41,48,55,58,61,64,67,70],[42,43,44,45,46,47],"Qian 乾 6","乾六天五祸绝延生","West, Dui","Northeast, Gen","Southwest, Kun","Northwest, Qian",[49,50,51,52,53,54],"Kan 坎 1","坎五天生延绝祸六","Southeast, Xun","East, Zhen","South, Li","North, Kan",[56,57,46,47,44,45],"Gen 艮 8","艮六绝祸生延天五",[59,60,53,54,51,52],"Zhen 震 3","震延生祸绝五天六",[62,63,54,53,52,51],"Xun 巽 4","巽天五六祸生绝延",[65,66,52,51,54,53],"Li 离 9","离六五绝延祸生天",[68,69,45,44,47,46],"Kun 坤 2","坤天延绝生祸五六",[71,72,47,46,45,44],"Dui 兑 7","兑生祸延绝六五天",{"heading":74,"body":75},"A ranking, not four equal gifts",[76,77,78],"The eight names form one ordered list, and the four favourable ones are simply the top of it: Sheng Qi, then Tian Yi, then Yan Nian, then Fu Wei, then Huo Hai, Liu Sha, Wu Gui, Jue Ming. The star names carry the same order — Tan Lang (贪狼) for Sheng Qi, Ju Men (巨门) for Tian Yi, Wu Qu (武曲) for Yan Nian, Zuo Fu (左辅) for Fu Wei. Nothing in the tradition treats the four as interchangeable.","The ranking is useful for exactly one thing: it tells you what to drop first. A room usually offers one or two usable orientations, not four. If only one is available, take Sheng Qi; if two, Sheng Qi and Tian Yi; Fu Wei is what you accept when nothing better fits, not a prize you were hoping for. The ordering itself is doctrine rather than measurement — it is consistent across the classical texts, which is the most that can honestly be said for it.","What the ranking cannot do is schedule anything. Eight Mansions has no time dimension: it does not shift with the year or the period, so it cannot tell you when a direction is worth using, only which ones sit on the favourable side of the list.",{"heading":80,"body":81},"When the person's table and the house's table disagree",[82,83,84],"There are two tables in Eight Mansions, and they are generated by the same eight verses. One is yours, from the ming gua. The other belongs to the building, from its measured sitting direction — the house gua. A direction can be Sheng Qi for you and Jue Ming for the house, and this happens constantly in flats nobody chose the orientation of.","The tradition does not settle the conflict. Some readings put the house first and treat the person as secondary; others reverse it. What the classical practice actually does is narrower than either: it reads three points — the door, the main bedroom and the stove — against the house table, and uses the person's table for the orientation of the body, which means the head of the bed and the direction a chair faces. That division is the one used here, because it keeps each table doing the job it is good at.","The compass is the weak link in both. Five degrees of error moves a reading across a sector boundary and renames every entry in the table, and a phone compass held near a steel door frame, a radiator or a fuse box can be off by more than that. Take the sitting direction from outside the building, away from metal, and take it three times before trusting it.",{"heading":86,"body":87},"A worked example you can redo on paper",[88,89,90],"A woman has a ming gua of 4, Xun. The verse is 巽天五六祸生绝延, and walking from Xun the order is Li, Kun, Dui, Qian, Kan, Gen, Zhen: Li takes 天医, Kun 五鬼, Dui 六煞, Qian 祸害, Kan 生气, Gen 绝命, Zhen 延年, and Xun keeps 伏位. Her four favourable directions are north (生气), south (天医), east (延年) and southeast (伏位). The whole calculation is four steps — gua, verse, walk, read — and it takes about a minute.","Her bedroom has one window, on the south wall. A headboard against the south wall means facing north, which is her Sheng Qi. A headboard against the north wall means facing south, which is her Tian Yi. Both are on the favourable side, so the choice is between first and second rank rather than between good and bad, and the room itself does not force either one.","She takes south for the bed, on the Tian Yi reading, because she wakes tired and the restorative label is the one she wants attached to sleep. Her desk goes in the living room facing north, on Sheng Qi, because work is the activity that needs the active one. Yan Nian and Fu Wei go unused — not because they are weak, but because a small flat gave her two usable orientations and she spent both. Nothing in that decision required a consultant, and nothing in it can be checked against an outcome, which is the honest limit of the table.",{"heading":92,"body":93,"bullets":94},"Three ways the table gets misread","These three come up often enough to be worth naming:",[95,96,97],"Treating all four as things you must use. Most rooms allow one or two orientations. The ranking exists so that dropping three of them is a decision rather than a failure.","Using the person's table to judge a room. The table ranks directions, not rooms. A Sheng Qi direction in a dark, damp, noisy bedroom is still a dark, damp, noisy bedroom, and the verse has nothing to say about that.","Ignoring compass error. The eight sectors are 45 degrees wide, so a reading within about 5 degrees of a boundary is uncertain, and the table will flip if it crosses. Near a boundary, treat the answer as a coin toss and let the room decide.",{"heading":99,"body":100},"What the table can and cannot do","What it can do is rank eight directions deterministically from a birth year, and rank the house's eight from a compass bearing, in a way anyone can redo with the verse and a protractor. That is more than most feng shui advice offers, and it is why the table has survived. What it cannot do is tell you whether the room is any good. That question is answered by light, noise, damp, draught, and whether the door opens onto the bed — all measurable, none of them in the verse. Use the ranking to choose between layouts that already work, and never to justify one that does not.",[102,110,116],{"id":103,"kind":104,"title":105,"detail":106,"publisher":107,"url":108,"accessedAt":109},"huangdiZhaijing","traditional","Huangdi Zhaijing (黄帝宅经)","Historical context for traditional residential orientation and spatial vocabulary. Modern recommendations are judged against real conditions.","Wikisource digital text","https:\u002F\u002Fzh.wikisource.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E9%BB%83%E5%B8%9D%E5%AE%85%E7%B6%93","2026-07-14",{"id":111,"kind":104,"title":112,"detail":113,"publisher":107,"url":114,"accessedAt":115},"zhouyiYijing","Book of Changes (周易)","The classical text that writes yang lines as 九 and yin lines as 六, which is where calling the ninth day double yang comes from. Cited for terminology, not for any claim about the date.","https:\u002F\u002Fzh.wikisource.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E5%91%A8%E6%98%93","2026-10-14",{"id":117,"kind":118,"title":119,"detail":120,"publisher":121,"url":122,"accessedAt":109},"apaBarnumEffect","practical","APA Dictionary of Psychology: Barnum effect","A psychology reference for why broad, favourable personality descriptions can feel personally accurate. It does not evaluate BaZi calculations themselves.","American Psychological Association","https:\u002F\u002Fdictionary.apa.org\u002Fbarnum-effect",[],{"title":5,"description":6,"path":125},"\u002Farticles\u002Ffour-auspicious-directions",{"src":127,"srcByLocale":128,"alt":130,"altByLocale":131,"captionByLocale":134,"width":138,"height":139},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Ffour-auspicious-directions.svg",{"tw":129},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Ffour-auspicious-directions-tw.svg","Nine-cell grid listing the eight Eight Mansions stars in fixed rank order.",{"zh":132,"tw":133},"九宫格图：八颗八宅星按固定次序排列，并标注名次不变、方位随命卦变。","九宮格圖：八顆八宅星按固定次序排列，並標註名次不變、方位隨命卦變。",{"en":135,"zh":136,"tw":137},"The four favourable names and the four unfavourable ones are one ordered list. Only the compass direction each name lands on changes with your gua.","四吉与四凶是同一张排序表的两端；会变的只是每个名字落在哪个罗盘方位，而它由你的命卦决定。","四吉與四凶是同一張排序表的兩端；會變的只是每個名字落在哪個羅盤方位，而它由你的命卦決定。",1280,960,{"topic":141,"articles":171,"tools":234},{"slug":8,"title":142,"eyebrow":143,"description":144,"relatedTools":145,"articleIdeas":146,"seo":151,"sections":155},"Eight Mansions Feng Shui","Ba Zhai feng shui","A working guide to Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai) feng shui: the personal ming gua, the house gua taken from a measured sitting direction, the eight-star table that joins them, and the three places the tradition actually reads.",[],[147,148,149,150],"Ming Gua Calculation","Four Auspicious Directions","Bed Placement by Eight Mansions","Room Selection by Personal Gua",{"title":152,"description":153,"path":154},"Eight Mansions Feng Shui Guide","Learn Eight Mansions feng shui: ming gua calculation, eight directions, favorable sectors, and practical home layout applications.","\u002Ftopics\u002Feight-mansions-feng-shui",[156,159,162,165,168],{"heading":157,"body":158},"What it is: two numbers, one table","Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai, 八宅) is the smallest complete system in feng shui. It needs two trigrams and nothing else. The gua of the person — the ming gua — is derived from the birth year and gender, with the year adjusted if the birthday falls before that year’s lunar new year. The gua of the house comes from its sitting direction, measured with a compass rather than assumed. Put the two side by side and the tradition hands back a fixed table: eight directions, each with a star already attached. There is no chart to draw, no period to look up, no star to fly. That smallness is the point, and it is also why the system gets claimed for far more than it does.",{"heading":160,"body":161},"The eight directions and what each one is for","The table always produces the same eight names. Four are read as favourable — Sheng Qi (生气), Tian Yi (天医), Yan Nian (延年), Fu Wei (伏位). Four are read as unfavourable — Jue Ming (绝命), Wu Gui (五鬼), Liu Sha (六煞), Huo Hai (祸害). Which direction receives which name depends entirely on the gua you started from, and the assignment is fixed by the Da You Nian song (大游年歌), a mnemonic that generates the whole table from a line of verse. Nothing in that process looks at your house, your health, or your year. It is arithmetic on a birth year and a compass bearing. Read the eight names as a vocabulary for ranking directions, and the system stops pretending to know things it was never built to know.",{"heading":163,"body":164},"East group or west group: which one are you","The eight gua split into two sets. Kan 1, Li 9, Zhen 3 and Xun 4 form the east group; Kun 2, Dui 7, Qian 6 and Gen 8 form the west group. An east-group person’s four favourable directions are the east-group directions, and the same holds on the west side. From that comes a claim you will hear often: east-group people should live in east-group houses. The underlying rule is real, but the veto is not. In a city flat you rarely choose the sitting direction, and a household of four frequently contains both groups. What the rule can honestly do is rank the rooms inside the house you already have.",{"heading":166,"body":167},"The three places that matter: door, bedroom, stove","Classical Ba Zhai is not a room-by-room audit. It reads three points — the door (门), the main bedroom (主) and the stove (灶) — and asks whether each sits in a favourable or unfavourable direction for the people who use it. The reason is historical. In the houses the system was built for, those three points were where household life actually happened, and surveying every square metre would have been wasted effort. Modern homes have more rooms and different routines, so keep the three-point habit as a way of setting priorities, then add the two or three rooms you genuinely spend hours in, and treat the rest as optional.",{"heading":169,"body":170},"When it doesn't help","Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, it ignores form: the road outside, the shape of the plot, a bedroom with no window. A favourable direction on a bad room is still a bad room. Second, it has no time dimension — unlike the flying star systems, Ba Zhai does not shift with the period or the year, so it cannot say anything about when. Third, the compass reading is the weak link: a phone compass, a steel door frame or a five-degree error can push a direction into the next sector and rename every entry in the table. Use Eight Mansions as a tie-breaker between layouts that already work, never as the reason to accept a layout that does not.",[172,184,187,198,210,223],{"slug":173,"title":174,"description":175,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":176,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":177,"updatedAt":178,"summary":179,"relatedTools":180,"seo":181},"ming-gua-calculation","Ming Gua: The Formula, and the Three Places It Breaks","Ming gua in one modular step: 2 minus the year for men, the year plus 4 for women, mod 9. The two-digit shorthand fails in all 100 years after 1999, and the fold at five doubles one gua.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fminggua-jisuan-fangfa.html","2026-01-29","2026-11-01","The formula is a single modular step that needs no century correction. Every disagreement between published tables comes from a convention: an expired two-digit shorthand, a fold at five that gives one gua double weight, and a year boundary at 立春 that sits about seven days from the lunar new year.",[],{"title":174,"description":182,"path":183},"How a ming gua is calculated, why the two-digit shorthand fails after 1999, what happens to a result of five, and where the birth year actually starts.","\u002Farticles\u002Fming-gua-calculation",{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":12,"summary":14,"relatedTools":185,"seo":186},[],{"title":5,"description":6,"path":125},{"slug":188,"title":189,"description":190,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":191,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":192,"updatedAt":178,"summary":193,"relatedTools":194,"seo":195},"bed-placement-eight-mansions","Bed Placement: The Wall Comes First, the Direction Second","Bed placement in Eight Mansions is two decisions: which wall can take a headboard, then which favourable direction that wall gives. A worked example shows the conflict no table resolves.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fbazhai-chuangwei-buju.html","2026-02-02","A solid headboard, a view of the door and no window overhead decide where the bed goes. The direction follows the headboard, so one wall can give two answers, and when two people share the bed their tables cross with no exchange rate between them.",[],{"title":189,"description":196,"path":197},"How Eight Mansions bed placement works once the wall is fixed: the four favourable directions, the position rules that come first, and a worked example with two people.","\u002Farticles\u002Fbed-placement-eight-mansions",{"slug":199,"title":200,"description":201,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":202,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":203,"updatedAt":204,"summary":205,"relatedTools":206,"seo":207},"room-selection-personal-gua","Room Selection by Personal Gua: Eight Mansions Guide","Compare room options using the traditional personal gua and house gua framework while accounting for daylight, ventilation, noise, access, area, and each household member's needs.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fbazhai-fangjian-xuanze.html","2026-02-04","2026-10-17","Treat personal gua as one optional traditional preference, not a verdict on who should use a room. Compare practical conditions and household needs before making a choice.",[],{"title":200,"description":208,"path":209},"Learn how personal gua is used as one traditional room-selection reference alongside practical household requirements.","\u002Farticles\u002Froom-selection-personal-gua",{"slug":211,"title":212,"description":213,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":214,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":12,"updatedAt":12,"summary":215,"relatedTools":216,"seo":218},"how-to-measure-house-facing-direction","How to Measure Which Way Your Home Faces","Three methods for the one input every direction-based method needs: a phone compass, a noon shadow, and the building's own plan. Each fails in a different way, and the cheapest one fails most often indoors.","","Sitting and facing are 180 degrees apart, so a home needs one measurement, not two. Eight sectors tolerate 22.5 degrees of error and twenty-four mountains tolerate 7.5, which decides whether a phone is enough. The page gives the four-reading test for a contaminated indoor compass, the solar-noon table for five cities, the plan method that ignores magnetism, and a worked case where 13 degrees flips the sector.",[217],"feng-shui-luo-pan",{"title":219,"description":220,"path":221,"type":222},"How to Measure Your Home's Facing Direction","Measure the facing direction of a flat with a phone compass, a noon shadow, or the building plan. Includes the four-reading contamination test, solar noon times, and where 13 degrees changes the sector.","\u002Farticles\u002Fhow-to-measure-house-facing-direction","article",{"slug":224,"title":225,"description":226,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":214,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":227,"updatedAt":227,"summary":228,"relatedTools":229,"seo":230},"bagua-map-placement","Bagua Map Placement: Which Wall, and Which North","The bagua map is pinned to the front door in one version and to the compass in another. What a sector contains, how much floor the centre gets, and where the two stop overlapping.","2026-10-31","Two maps share the same nine trigram names and disagree about what they are pinned to. The compass version gives each trigram 45 degrees, which is exactly three of the luopan's 24 mountains, and leaves the centre with no angular width at all. The door-aligned version divides the plan into nine equal cells, so the centre holds 11.1 per cent of the floor. Rotate one against the other and the overlap is arithmetic: at 30 degrees the two southeast corners share a third of the same patch, at 45 they share nothing. On an L-shaped plan the nine cells stop being ninths, and a five-degree instrument error leaves a fifth of all headings undecided.",[217],{"title":231,"description":232,"path":233,"type":222},"Bagua Map: Two Versions, Two Anchors","Two bagua maps share the same nine names and disagree about the anchor. Sector widths, a centre with no width, and the rotation at which they stop overlapping.","\u002Farticles\u002Fbagua-map-placement",[],{"articles":236},[237,240,243],{"slug":173,"title":174,"description":175,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":176,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":177,"updatedAt":178,"summary":179,"relatedTools":238,"seo":239},[],{"title":174,"description":182,"path":183},{"slug":188,"title":189,"description":190,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":191,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":192,"updatedAt":178,"summary":193,"relatedTools":241,"seo":242},[],{"title":189,"description":196,"path":197},{"slug":199,"title":200,"description":201,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":202,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":203,"updatedAt":204,"summary":205,"relatedTools":244,"seo":245},[],{"title":200,"description":208,"path":209},1793614151947]